Category: Philosophy
Chat with a computer, about a free market economy
John – Are you into sports.
[ Af:0 At:10 Sp:0] Sports is not my cup of tea. I prefer intellectual challenges like Go.
John – Who's the world Go champion.
[ Af:0 At:10 Sp:0] Sorry. I can't help you. A celebrity of some sort?
John – Do you play chess?
[ Af:0 At:10 Sp:0] I don't play any games except Go.
John – Can we play Go on here?
[ Af:0 At:10 Sp:0] About playing… Does it make sense to you that we reward athletes more than scientists?
John – Television coverage makes that possible.
[ Af:0 At:10 Sp:0] It's a free market economy. And people value entertainment more than serious things like science and education.
John – And your point is?
One judge thought that "Suzette" was more human than a competing human decoy, but I would have been suspicious of the line about a "free market economy." There is more here, including more of the dialogue, and also here.
I thank Michelle Dawson for the pointer; here is my paper with Michelle on the Turing test.
Popularizing the Arrow Impossibility Theorem
Arnold Kling presents it as an under-popularized idea, so here is my attempt to popularize it:
Let's say you had two people on a desert island, John and Tom, and John wants jazz music on the radio and Tom wants rap. Furthermore any decision procedure must be consistent, in the sense of applying the same algorithm to other decisions. In this set-up (with a further assumption), there is only dictatorship, namely the rule that either "Tom gets his way" or "John gets his way."
Arrow's axioms, by invoking "the independence of irrelevant alternatives" (read: pairwise comparisons) require that all information in the problem be ordinal. A decision procedure such as: "Turn the radio (and allocate other resources) to which station makes the winner happier" is ruled out per se. Which person is happier cannot be expressed in the language of pairwise comparisons, which allow you to claim only that "John prefers jazz to rap" and so on. "Let Tom and John trade" also won't do, whether or not transactions costs are high. That's not a social welfare function as Arrow defined it.
I sense the above paragraph isn't a very charming popularization (it wouldn't make the Freakonomics movie), but let's continue.
That's a two-person example. With 17 persons, Arrow's clever method of partitioning shows that conflicted decisions ultimately must break down to one-on-one comparisons of different individual preferences, returning us to the island/radio example.
For a truly popular audience, you could go on about the difference between inter-profile and intra-profile social welfare functions.
I believe that a popularized version of Arrow's theorem, which explains where the main result actually comes from (strong IIA), is not very impressive to most people. That may be one reason why the theorem doesn't get popularized so much.
Here is one very good transparent version of a proof, which requires virtually zero mathematics. If you work through this paper, you will understand the theorem and where it comes from. Here is a related journal article.
Words of wisdom
The best advice about how to conduct yourself at work is to know yourself, and get new information–from outside your own experience–about what is possible in the world. And that is what fiction, and plays, and poetry, and this blog, are about.
More here. I thank Alex and Garett for having done a short (very short) jaunt to El Salvador with me; more on that soon.
What does a utilitarian approach to animal rights suggest?
The most dangerous form of malaria originated in gorillas…
And AIDS seems to have come from chimpanzees.
Add up the numbers and figure out the utilitarian-preferred policy.
That is one reason why I believe a pure utilitarian approach to animal (or human animal) welfare does not work, namely that it leads to morally horrible consequences. This is one topic I wished I had brought up with Peter Singer.
The people are upset at Greg Mankiw
You could try Kevin Drum, Mark Thoma, or Brad DeLong, or some of the comments on MR, among other commentators. Various remarks are made to lower the status of George Bush, or Greg Mankiw, or to raise the relative status of Barack Obama and his fiscal policy. Furthermore not everyone likes Greg's benchmarks, or accepts the typicality of his example.
When I read Greg's piece, I see it as fair to compare current marginal rates to a zero taxation benchmark, without advocating the latter. To understand a tax system you compare it to no taxes, as an exercise, and to avoid potential problems with the near-intransitivity of indifference.
I also see that if a person runs a successful small business, has a long time horizon, has a strong bequest motive, and can earn eight percent nominal a year (make it reinvestment in a private business if you don't buy the equity premium story), that person faces a very high marginal tax rate. In one of Greg's examples it's about ninety percent.
That some producers are motivated by ego does not change that fact. Furthermore, many small businessmen don't receive Greg's global recognition and they really do work hard for the money above all else.
Greg's column focuses on efficiency but I am more struck by the possibility that such marginal rates are morally wrong and I wonder if that is not his view too.
Greg's scenario doesn't have to be a "typical" case and indeed the taxation – if nothing else — will ensure that it is not a typical case or not nearly as common a case as it ought to be. Another way to put the point is to note that deviations from a progressive consumption tax may be less morally defensible than we had thought.
I also view Greg's column as a chance to learn. What comes to mind are two possible defenses of our tax system-to-be:
1. In reality, eveyrone has a short time horizon, driven by short-term ego rewards and thus such high long-term tax rates can work.
2. The tax system will be an efficient means of price discrimination. The people with truly long time horizons can work around some of the high rates, especially for estates. The people with short time horizons will pay up and those are the same people whose labor won't be much deterred. (There is an interesting discordance in that Greg claims to belong to one camp but some of his critics wish to put him in the other.)
The second claim seems more plausible to me, but they're both worth thinking about. Neither, in my view, removes the moral issue.
There are plenty of encoded status claims in Greg's initial piece, and perhaps that is one reason why it induced so much hostility. I say keep your eye on the ball, filter out the analytically irrelevant social information, and consider that, even if you wish to raise taxes on the wealthy, that a ninety percent marginal rate — even at a non-universal margin — is a sign that something really is amiss.
Addendum: Andrew Gelman comments, and again. And here is Reihan Salam. And here is Ryan Avent. And here is Greg's response.
The Charter 08 document
It helped Liu Xiaobo win a Nobel Peace Prize. Here is one good paragraph of many:
Protection of Private Property. We should establish and protect the right to private property and promote an economic system of free and fair markets. We should do away with government monopolies in commerce and industry and guarantee the freedom to start new enterprises. We should establish a Committee on State-Owned Property, reporting to the national legislature, that will monitor the transfer of state-owned enterprises to private ownership in a fair, competitive, and orderly manner. We should institute a land reform that promotes private ownership of land, guarantees the right to buy and sell land, and allows the true value of private property to be adequately reflected in the market.
Hat tip goes to Matt Yglesias.
*Little Did I Know: Excerpts from Memory* the new Stanley Cavell memoir
To recognize the end of the day and get to bed, I developed the ritual of eating a box of Oreo cookies together with a can of applesauce. But really the ritual is equally describable as an effort to stop myself from eating the entire box of cookies, a sequence of five (was it?) pairs, each pair stacked in a pleated pliable plastic cup, and from finishing the accompanying applesauce, having conceived the idea that this was not a sensible diet. I slowed the eating by inventing new ways of going through the cookies. One way was to nibble around the circumference of a cookie before finishing off the remaining rough-edged center; another was to twist apart the two wafers of each Oreo, eat off the sugary middle spread from whichever of the wafers it largely adhered to, intending to eat only that one of that double cookie. But each night I lost the battle to stop eating before the package and the can were emptied. I recognize that to this day I unfailingly at the end of a meal leave some portion of food, if sometimes quite small, on my dish — as if to reassure myself that I am free.
I do the same, I should add. That passage is from Stanley Cavell, one of America's leading philosophers. If you're looking for a book which steps outside the usual mode of strict narrative, I recommend this highly, but it will leave many people frustrated. You can buy it here.
For the pointer I thank David Gordon.
Should they have let the guy’s house burn down?
David Henderson blogs some of the basic information (Cohn at TNR comments here). Here is the upshot:
He refers to a story about a man who failed to pay an annual fee for fire protection and then, when his house caught on fire and he called the fire department, the fire department refused to show up.
They wouldn't even let him pay up ex post. David notes that this is a government-run fire department and thus the story is not much of a moral reductio on the market. Arguably a private company would behave the same way, sometimes, but it 's odd to claim that government failure reminds you market failure is possible and so let's damn the market. By the way, markets do pretty well at setting up schemes with a penalty for late payment; that's how my mortgage works.
I would make a broader point. Any social system must, at some stage of interactions, impose some morally unacceptable penalties. If you are very hungry, and you shoplift food, they still might prosecute you. If you don't pay your taxes, and resist wage garnishes, they might put you in jail. If you resist arrest, they might, at some point in the chain of events, shoot you while trying to escape. Somewhere along the line there is a doctor who can treat your rare disease except he doesn't feel like working so much, and so he lets you die or suffer; you can find both private and public sector examples here.
Social systems proceed by (usually) covering up the brutalities upon which they are based. The doctor doesn't let you get to his door and then turn you away, rather his home address is hard to find. The government handcuffs you so they don't have to shoot you trying to escape. And so on.
To borrow language from Thomas Schelling, social systems involve costs in terms of both "known" and "statistical" lives. It's the sum total of costs which is important. It's fine (though controversial) to argue that a "known" life should be more important than a "statistical" life, but it's not dispositive to pull out one example of a "known" life and draw a significant conclusion from that anecdote. That's what we teach students not to do in first year principles, sometimes citing Bastiat, the seen and the unseen, and so on.
I don't favor the policies of this fire department, but simply pointing out the vividness one of these social brutalities doesn't much influence me about the broader principles at stake.
Is there any economic basis to homophobia?
William Alexander Johnson asks:
I always make sure to read your blog, and a while ago a Marginal-Revolution-type question popped into my mind:
Is homophobia the only form of hatred that doesn't have an economic component?
As far as I can tell, most hatreds between different peoples are caused to a great extent by economic conflicts. Whites vs. blacks in the U.S., Europeans vs. natives in former European colonies, Christianity vs. Judaism vs. Islam, locals vs. immigrants in countries across the world, animosity between different castes in India, and even killings of supposed witches in tribal societies all have very important economic dimensions.
But homophobia seems to have absolutely no economic component. I've heard that homosexuals are on average a little more economically successful than heterosexuals, but I very seriously doubt that that has the slightest bit to do with anything.
I can't think of any other form of hatred so divorced from "rational" conflict, so to speak.
…What do you think?
Bryan Caplan predicts greater tolerance in the future and Andrew Sullivan sees positive trends. I do favor both gay marriage and other advances in gay rights, but when I scan the evidence, I am a bit pessimistic. The positive short-run momentum is clear, but what about the longer run? I see the following:
1. Prejudice and bullying against gay individuals is often brutal and unreasonable and it is applied where there is no evidence of harm from gays. The prejudice is often strongest among teenagers and young males, and it weakens somewhat with age and socialization.
2. Strong prejudices against gay men and women are found in every culture I know of, past or present. And yet in many cases homosexuality "limits the competition," so to speak. This potential gain finds little appreciation.
3. There is a common and sometimes strong "disgust reaction," especially to gay men.
4. We learn from John Boswell that high levels of gay tolerance, in antiquity, were followed by a counter-reaction and higher levels of prejudice.
5. Religion, conservative morals, and sexual traditionalism make periodic comebacks.
Looking at the overall pattern, I wonder whether many individuals have a natural, innate proclivity to dislike gay men and women and to feel discomfort with the entire idea of homosexuality, bisexuality too of course. Those preferences are not universal and they can be mediated by positive social forces, but left to their own devices, they will periodically reemerge in strength.
On which issues will we become less moral?
Ross Douthat considers the hoary question of which current practices we will someday condemn, linking also to Appiah, who raised it, and Will Wilkinson. Prisons, factory farming, immigration barriers, and abortion are among the nominations. I would suggest an alternate query, namely which practices currently considered to be outrageous will make a moral comeback in the court of public opinion. Torture and loss of privacy — in some of its forms at least — already seem to be on the rise, at least in terms of their acceptability in the United States.
What kind of moral status will "probabilistically causing natural disasters" have in the future? What status does it have now?
With rising health care costs and tight budgets in many countries, can we not expect euthanasia to rise in moral popularity? Will the principles for cutting off care force us to transparently embrace some ugly moral principle, or will the ugliness be our lack of transparency and arbitrariness on these matters?
Preemptive warfare feels unpopular, because Iraq and Afghanistan have gone poorly, and because there have no more major successful terrorist attacks on U.S. soil. I predict the idea will make a comeback. Robot and drone warfare may become even more commonplace, as will targeting at a distance and selective cyberwarfare. Those practices don't have to be wrong, but they could lead us to be morally cavalier about fighting a destructive war, even more than we are today. By the way, the French seem pretty happy about the recent U.S. intensification of drone warfare in Pakistan, which is directed at stopping an planned attack in Europe.
Tolerance of gay individuals and alternative lifestyles is at a historic high. I would not endorse a crude "regression toward the mean" hypothesis, but we should at least try it on for size. That tolerance is as likely to fall back as to progress.
Won't targeted genetic tests make abortion more popular and less sanctioned? Rural India is already full of ultrasound clinics. Won't the possibility of discrimination on the basis of genes (not many will refuse to do it, or make use of the information, if only implicitly) make discrimination more acceptable altogether?
On the bright side, totalitarianism and mass murder of one's civilian population have been out of style since the Nazis, the Soviets, and Mao. In that sense we still can expect the future to be morally superior to the past. But those gains were achieved some time ago. If we capitalize them, and take them for granted, at the other margins I am not convinced that we are going to see lots of moral improvement over the next fifty to one hundred years.
Trolley Problem Biases
In one variant of the trolley problem a trolley is rapidly bearing down on the innocent five who can be saved but only by pushing a single fat man onto the tracks. Do you push the fat man or not? The question throws into stark relief the moral theories of consequentialism and deontology.
Now suppose the fat man is named Tyrone. Does that change your answer? What if the fat man is named Chip?
In The Motivated Use of Moral Principles (pdf) the authors show that self-identified liberals are more reluctant to sacrifice Tyrone than Chip despite prior agreement that race is irrelevant to moral questions of this kind. Even more interesting when first presented with the Tyrone story liberals subsequently become less consequentialist even regarding Chip. But when first presented with the Chip story they maintain consequentialism for Tyrone.
On different questions, such as how consequentialist to be in military situations, self-identified conservatives swing back and forth in similar ways depending on whether Americans are attacking or being attacked.
Unfortunately, the authors don't present their statistical results in as clear a form as I would have liked (percentage changes would have been nice) so it's a little unclear how large the effect is. Nevertheless, although the conclusion isn't surprising it's interesting to see these results even in as clean a context as one could ever hope for:
Rather than being moral rationalists who reason from general principle to specific judgment, it appears as if people have a “moral toolbox” available to them where they selectively draw upon arguments that help them build support for their moral intuitions. While the present studies do not imply that general principles never play a direct, a priori role in moral judgment, they do suggest that moral judgments can be influenced by social desires or motivations, and that moral principles can be rationalizations for other causes of the judgment.
Hat tip Psychology Today.
Opinion warning signs
Robin Hanson makes a list of "Signs that your opinions function more to signal loyalty and ability than to estimate truth:"
- You find it hard to be enthusiastic for something until you know that others oppose it.
- You have little interest in getting clear on what exactly is the position being argued.
- Realizing that a topic is important and neglected doesn’t make you much interested.
- You have little interest in digging to bigger topics behind commonly argued topics.
- You are less interested in a topic when you don’t foresee being able to talk about it.
- You are uncomfortable taking a position near the middle of the opinion distribution.
- You are uncomfortable taking a position of high uncertainty about who is right.
- You care far more about current nearby events than similar distant or past/future events.
- You find it easy to conclude that those who disagree with you are insincere or stupid.
- You are reluctant to change your publicly stated positions in response to new info.
- You are reluctant to agree a rival’s claim, even if you had no prior opinion on the topic.
- More?
I would add: You feel uncomfortable taking a position which raises the status of the people you usually disagree with.
Ilya Somin and Alison Schmauch are now married
I am honored to have been the speaker at their wedding this evening. Part of my remarks discussed Charles Darwin's notes on marriage – arguments for and against – which are well worth reading (I thank A.C. for the pointer to those). He was afraid of no more balloon trips, not being able to visit America, having to visit relatives too often, and having less time and less money to spend on books. But still he did it and here is the closing bit:
Never mind my boy– Cheer up– One cannot live this solitary life, with groggy old age, friendless & cold, & childless staring one in ones face, already beginning to wrinkle.– Never mind, trust to chance–keep a sharp look out– There is many a happy slave–
The value of a liberal arts education
Seth Roberts writes:
…is “liberal education” so hard to defend that no one can coherently defend it?
Bryan Caplan also seems skeptical, although I do not recall if he has tackled liberal arts education per se.
A liberal arts education helps us think with greater subtlety, even if it does not improve our performance on subsequent standardized tests. I see an impact here even on the lesser students in state universities. It also helps explain how the U.S. so suddenly leaps from having so-so high schools to outstanding graduate schools; how many other countries emphasize liberal arts education in between?
Liberal arts education forces us to decode systems of symbols. We learn how complex systems of symbols can be and what is required to decode them and why that can be a pleasurable process. That skill will come in handy for a large number of future career paths. It will even help you enjoy TV shows more.
For related reasons, I believe that people who learn a second language as adults are especially good at understanding how other people might see things differently.
I am interested in food (among other topics), not only because of the food itself. I also view it as an investment in understanding symbolic meaning, cultural codes of excellence, the transmission of ideas, and also how the details of an area fit together to form a coherent whole. I believe this knowledge makes me smarter and wiser, although I am not sure which mass-produced formal test would pick up any effects. I view this interest as continuing my liberal arts education, albeit through self-education.
Up close, I see Yana getting four years of a liberal arts education and I believe that her school is a very good one. I have not seriously flirted with the idea that she is learning nothing important.
Serial hyperspecializers, and how they think
The highly-regarded-but-still undervalued Elijah Millgram has a paper on this topic, and he seems to be preparing a book. Here is one good short bit:
So one reasonable strategy for a hyperspecializer will be to divide its energies between activities that don't share standards and methods of assessment, and let's abbreviate that to the fuzzier, problematic, but more familiar word, "values." It will be a normal side effect of pursuing the parallel hyperspecialization strategy that its values are incommensurable. The hedonic signals that guide reallocation of resources between niches do not require that niche-bound desires or goals or standards be comparable across niches. If you are a serial (and so, often a parallel) hyperspecializer, incommensurability in your values turns out not to be a mark of practical irrationality, or even an obstacle to full practical rationality, but rather, the way your evaluative world will look to you, when you are doing your practical deliberation normally and successfully. Evaluative incommensurability is a threat to the sort of rationality suitable for Piltdown Man. Serial hyperspecializers gravitate towards and come equipped for incommensurability.
Here is a good review of Millgram's latest book, which argues, among other things, that truth is messy in nature.
Adam Phillips serves up a Bob Dylan quotation: "I have always admired people who have left behind them an incomprehensible mess."